Free The Wonder Effect by Frederik Pohl Page A

enchantment.
    So we thought of it in those days and so, in almost as great degree, do we think of it today, though I venture to suppose that, once this great war is over, those same creations of Count Zeppelin which bombed me last night may dispel some of the mystery, exorcise the enchantment and bring light into the darkness-. May it be so, though I trust that whatever discoveries these aeronauts of tomorrow may bring will not repeat the discovery Herr Faesch made known to me in 1864.
    The squalor of ocean travel in those days is no part of my story. It existed and I endured it for what seemed like an eternity, but at last I bade farewell to Le Flamant and all her roaches, rats and stench. Nor does it become this memoir to discuss the tragic failure of the mission Miss Cox had given me.
    (Those few who remember my Peoples of the Earth will perhaps also remember the account given in the chapter I entitled “Africa Journeyings.” Those, still fewer, whose perception revealed to them an unaccountable gap between the putrid sore throat with which I was afflicted at the headwaters of the Congo and my leave taking on the Gold Coast will find herewith the chronicle of the missing days).
    It is enough to say that I found no empires in 1864. If they had existed, and I believe they had, they were vanished with Sheba’s Queen. I did, however, find Herr Faesch. Or he found me.
    How shall I describe Herr Faesch for you? I shan’t, Shaw notwithstanding, permit myself so hackneyed a term as “hardy Swiss”; I am not so far removed from the youthful spring of creation as that. Yet Swiss he was, and surely hardy as well, for he discovered me (or his natives did) a thousand miles from a community of Europeans, deserted by my own bearers, nearer to death than ever I have been since. He told me that I tried thrice to kill him, in my delirium; but he nursed me well and I lived. As you see.
    He was a scientific man, a student of Nature’s ways, and a healer, though one cure was beyond him. For, sick though I was, he was more ravaged by destructive illness than I. I woke in a firelit hut with a rank poultice at my throat and a naked savage daubing at my brow, and I was terrified; no, not of the native, but of the awful cadaverous face, ghost-white, that frowned down at me from the shadows.
    That was my first sight of Herr Faesch.
    When, a day later, I came able to sit up and to talk, I found him a gentle and brave man, whose English was every bit as good as my own, whose knowledge surpassed that of any human I met before or since. But the mark of death was on him. In that equatorial jungle, his complexion was alabaster. Ruling the reckless black warriors who served him, his strength yet was less than a child’s. In those steaming afternoons when I hardly dared stir from my cot for fear of stroke, he wore gloves and a woollen scarf at his neck.
    We had, in all, three days together. As I regained my health, his health dwindled.
    He introduced himself to me as a native of Geneva, that colorful city on the finest lake of the Alps. He listened courteously while I told him of my own errand and did me, and the absent Miss Cox, the courtesy of admiring the spirit which prompted it- though he was not sanguine of my prospects of finding the empires.
    He said nothing of what had brought him to this remote wilderness, but I thought I knew. Surely gold. Perhaps diamonds or some other gem, but I thought not; gold was much more plausible.
    I had picked up enough of the native dialect to catch perhaps one word in twenty of what he said to his natives and they to him-enough, at any rate, to know that when he left me in their charge for some hours, that first day, he was going to a hole in the
    ground. It could only be a mine, and what, I asked myself, would a European trouble to mine in the heart of unexplored Africa but gold?
    I was wrong, of course. It was not gold at all.
    Wells says that they are doing astonishing things at the Cavendish Laboratory, but